Privacy Policy
JClub is a personal research-feed app. This policy explains what data the app handles, why, and the choices you have.
What we collect
You can use JClub without an account. As a guest, your preferences (journals, interests, saved papers) stay on your device.
- If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive your name, email address and (for Google) profile picture, and we store your preferences on our servers so they sync across devices: followed journals, authors and institutions, interest keywords, saved papers and lists, keyword alerts, and notification settings.
- If you connect your ORCID iD, we read your public ORCID record (works, affiliation) to personalize your feed and enable citation alerts.
- To rank your feed, we record in-app reading activity for your account — such as which papers you open, save or dismiss. If you enable notifications, we store your device push token.
What we do not do
We do not sell your data, show ads, or use your data for advertising. We do not track you across other apps or websites. Your saved papers, lists and follows are private to your account — nothing you do in JClub is visible to other users.
Services we rely on
- Article metadata comes from PubMed (NCBI), OpenAlex, bioRxiv and medRxiv. Queries for article data are not tied to your identity.
- AI summaries and briefs are generated by sending article titles and abstracts (never your personal data) to OpenAI.
- Our servers and database are hosted on Railway; push notifications are delivered through Expo’s notification service.
AI-generated summaries
To help you scan papers quickly, JClub can show a short, AI-generated summary of each paper (produced via OpenAI from the paper’s title and abstract). These summaries are generated automatically, may contain errors or omissions, and are not a substitute for reading the original article — please verify anything important against the source.
Content & copyright
The papers JClub surfaces — including their titles and abstracts — are created by their authors and publishers and remain the property of those rights holders; JClub claims no ownership of them. We display a paper’s full abstract only where the source’s license permits reuse (for example, open-access articles); for every other paper we show our own AI-generated summary together with a link to the original. Every paper links back to its publisher or repository of record.
Your choices & deletion
You can delete your account at any time in the app: Settings → Delete account. This permanently removes your account and all associated data from our servers — profile, follows, saved papers, alerts, activity and push tokens.
You can also sign out to stop syncing, disable notifications in system settings, and disconnect ORCID at any time.
Contact
Questions or requests about your data: support@jclub.com.au